100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: A Memoir
By Kim Stafford
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About this ebook
Kim Stafford
Kim Stafford is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College and author of eighteen books of poetry and prose, including Singer Come from Afar (Red Hen Press) and 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared (Trinity University Press). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Harpers, the Atlantic, and other magazines. His books have received Pacific Northwest Book Awards and a Citation for Excellence from the Western States Book Awards. In 2018 he was named Oregon Poet Laureate for a two-year term. He lives with his family in Portland, Oregon.
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Reviews for 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do
2 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Poignant, honest, and present in the author's suffering and writing.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Kim Stafford is a second generation poet and essayist. He is the son of William Stafford, Oregon Poet Laureate and pacifist. William Stafford was a conscientious objector during WWII. He and his wife raised their four children in a loving, bookish principled home, mostly in Lake Oswego Oregon. The two boys, Kim and Bret, were close in age, almost twins. In this book, Kim Stafford attempts to come to terms with Bret’s suicide in 1988 at age 40. Told in a series of 100 vignettes; this book is beautifully written. There is a wonderful sense of place. The Staffords loved the outdoors, and I loved reading a book set in my own, wonderfully lush, Pacific Northwest. “I have realized only recently that in my childhood we were poor. Maybe we felt rich because we lived with bountiful stories, ideas, places. Abundance was everywhere—the sky, rivers with their infinitely changing ways, mornings in summer that lasted longer than a life.”The book is sad. Stafford searches through his memories of his childhood and his brother, looking for the reasons behind his brother’s depression and suicide. Bret was the good brother, Kim more the troublemaker. Kim wonders if this is what doomed Bret. Kim’s survivor’s guilt is palpable.At times I wanted to shake Kim and tell him, maybe it isn’t about anything you or your family did or didn’t do. Maybe it was just lousy brain chemistry. Kim knows this at one level, but at another level can’t keep himself from looking for answers to the unanswerable.
Book preview
100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do - Kim Stafford
PROLOGUE: THE TRICK
In 1958, when he was ten, my older brother Bret found an ad in the back of a comic book and ordered 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do. When this pamphlet of secrets arrived, he flipped through to the last and most difficult trick: how to jerk a tablecloth away but leave a wine glass standing. Like many tricks in this life, the materials were ordinary, but the required sleight of hand approached the impossible.
He waited until everyone was gone from home, set the Finnish sherry glass on the dishtowel—a handmade crystal that family friends had brought us from afar. Bret held the selvage in his hands, took a breath, and yanked the cloth. Shattered glass flew everywhere.
Long after Bret was gone, I would tell our son, Guthrie, who had never met his uncle, stories of that era when I had a brother and the world was young. It was an era spangled with mysteries and delights.
One day, when Guthrie was ten, as we sat at our family table, he took the edge of the tablecloth in his hands, cast a sly smile in my direction, and said, Dad, shall I do the trick?
He laughed, made a feint to twitch the cloth in his hands, and my mind went far. The present moment dropped away, and I watched my brother in a parade of enigmatic moments from childhood through our years together and beyond.
Guthrie,
I said, "I could write a book about Uncle Bret called 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do, and tell all kinds of stories from his life."
Yeah, Dad,
Guthrie said, but suicide was the trick that didn’t work.
Well, one of the tricks that didn’t work. In my brother’s life, his last desperate day was but one in an array of mysteries. How many tricks are required to become a man? What have been my own encounters with this fierce set of hidden tests and amazing feats? And Guthrie, this man-child in my life—what moments from his story best reveal our need? The essential code must include the tricks of confidence, loneliness, sex, fear, anger—how to begin a courtship and know it is right, how to end a job when it goes wrong, how to crawl from the wreckage when this life falters, how to plunge to the cellar of sorrow and grope for the ladder that might bring you back into some kind of light, no matter how dim or strange.
How many lessons must be clawed from trouble in order to survive? By what infinite practice in sleight of hand does one become a human being?
BOOK I. GOOD NIGHT
EVERY NIGHT WHEN WE WERE SMALL . . .
My brother was born in the summer of 1948, in August, shortly after Hiroshima Day, three years beyond the war. Our mother went to see the doctor after baby Bret had arrived.
How are you doing?
the doctor said.
How soon can I have another?
our mother replied, deflecting concern for herself or her child. She was ebullient, looking forward, far beyond the infant at her side.
So, the next year, in October, I was born, and the golden time began. My birth announcement is written as if by my brother:
A fine thing! I now have to
share my bottle with a Kim.
—Bret Stafford
The young couple, Bill and Dorothy, had their two boys, and we were off.
My brother and I were pals, caught snakes, built forts, tried hard to fit the family pantheon of right behavior, and wavered in our glory. Once I had to leave the dinner table for some forgotten infraction. Bret looked down at me, playing gamely alone on the floor.
We could give Kimmie this old piece of cheese,
he suggested, seeking a reprieve for his pal. So I got to return to the table, was handed a plate with the old piece of cheese. I said my own quick Amen over it, and then fell to.
Our friends could not believe we never fought, but it was so. Mornings, we greeted each other across the narrow space between our beds. Evenings, as we huddled side by side on the couch, our parents read to us from a book called Fifty Famous Stories. In those tales, King Alfred made a plan to save the kingdom . . . the Black Douglas climbed a ladder to frighten a mother and child . . . the Wise Men of Gotham mocked their King . . . Dick Whittington gave his cat to the Merchant and thus became Lord Mayor of London . . . and Genghis Khan killed his favorite falcon in a rage. Story by story, we were schooled to survive by learning the mysterious ways of the human. Apparently, there were many tricks required to get it right—sometimes you had to be angry, or thoughtful, humble, tender, wise—or foolish—but always brave. These lessons went into our minds like seeds, and we were sent to bed to dream.
Our mother taught third grade. She was a genius at this, despite having the use of only her left arm, from childhood injuries; she kept her right tucked in her pocket, and no one seemed to pay any attention, as she had a graceful, inviting manner. Our father wrote poems, and worked at his college. He was ambitious about his poetry, and later won the National Book Award, but he did his writing before we were awake. When we were small, writing seemed his hobby.
A sister, Kit, came to us, then another, Barbara. We six were a tribe that moved to a new land every year—Oregon, Iowa, Oregon, Indiana, California, Oregon. It seems our parents kept trying out the Midwest again, where they had been born, or searching always for the better job. I don’t remember questioning; in spring, as if we were wild birds, it was time to leave everything behind, and travel far away.
I thought my powers of understanding and confidence (and humbled foolishness) were my brother’s powers as well. Days were serene.
When Bret was nine, in January of 1958, back in Oregon, he told our father he was writing a story: The Mystery of a Gun. This gun, when it shoots, says a word—the sound of the owner’s name.
Our father wrote this little story down in his notebook, and saved it for later.
A gun that would say your name? Where did that come from?
Our lives were idyllic in many ways. We camped, hiked through deserts and mountains, made forts in the woods near our house, where we could wander in safety in those days.
And every night when we were small, just before sleep my brother would whisper from his bed, Shall we make a bridge?
I would slide out with my hands walking to his side, my feet propped on my bed, and he would crawl across my back to my bed, and then he would make a bridge, and I would crawl across him to mine, and then from our two beds we would hum and sing and babble until our words began to grow soft with sleep, and then I would hear his voice chant our blessing poem—
Good night,
God bless you,
Have sweet dreams,
See you tomorrow . . .
because we had developed this way to guard the day’s end, and I would reply to him softly enough so our parents would not hear from the living room down the hall, but he could hear me well, just there, Good night, God bless you, have sweet dreams, see you tomorrow,
and then the understanding was that nothing more could be said, or need be said, for we had covered the bases of farewell, blessing, gift, and hope, and so could sleep, and we did. And then we woke up and it was high school, but still, somehow, as if to keep one landmark firm in a storm of change from his bed, through the soft Oregon dark just shadowed by Douglas fir limbs across the streetlight outside, from across the room I would hear, Good night, God bless you, have sweet dreams, see you tomorrow,
and I would reply in kind, and then there were years and he was gone—to college, and into mystery, and we went our separate ways, to towns apart, to jobs, to families of our own, but still by dark so soft I will disturb no one—not wife or child—but addressing the soft Oregon dark I whisper to him, and then I listen . . . listen . . . in the dark I listen for my brother.
NO GIFT
Christmas Eve, 1987, as we threw our presents into a box for the drive to my sister’s house for the big family gathering, I realized I had a gift for everyone but my brother. My wife, Beverly, and our daughter, Rosie, yes. My sisters, Kit and Barb, yes. Mother and Daddy, yes. My brother’s wife, Lynne, and their daughter, Katie, and son, Matt, all yes. But my brother, no. In haste, I scrawled on a card, Bret—let’s have lunch together once a month in the coming year. —your brother, Kim.
In the frenzy that night, across the room, I watched my brother. He was a slight man, shorter and thinner than me, though a year older. Dressed in a plaid shirt, observing everyone from a chair just out of the lamplight. His mouth, as often, slightly open, showing his shy smile. His gray eyes shone, the lids slightly lowered, as if he had decided he could not afford to be surprised by anything. He was holding on. Any change in his resolve would hurt too much.
Now I see these details in his face. Then I did not. He was just my brother, and he carried with him, I thought, a lifetime of joys we had shared. I projected over his sorrow the light of our early days, and by this I was blind to him.
When the time came that night, Bret opened my card, read it, glanced at me, and nodded. We had a plan.
Though we lived in the same state, we had not seen each other much. I was teaching at Lewis & Clark College, in Portland, where our father had taught, and had just published a book of essays called Having Everything Right. He had been working as a land-use planner in Hood River, an hour east of Portland. That was just far enough to keep us from meeting by whim, as we had in earlier days. And then he had moved his family—wife Lynne, daughter Katie, and son Matthew—to Salem, an hour south from me. But before parting that night we agreed on a day to meet for lunch in Aurora, a little town between us.
He drove north from his job at the Marion County Planning Department, and I drove south from Lewis & Clark. We met at a tavern bordered on both sides by antique stores, ordered hamburgers and beer. The small-town lunch crowd was talkative, and we seemed to fit in—two brothers catching up on family and work. We skated the surface that day, but ended with a plan to meet the next month in Donald, a little farm town west of the freeway between Portland and Salem.
This time my brother rode his bike—a good twenty miles through the farmland he was sworn to protect in his role as county planner. While I waited at the Donald Cafe, I studied the collection of ancient toasters on display—all kinds of mechanisms for the electric transformation of bread, involving sheets of mica, knobs for flipping a slice. And then there came my brother, swinging off the seat and coasting the last half block expertly balanced on the left pedal. We ordered eggs and toast, I told about how my wife, Beverly, had a new wooden flute, and she was working her way through Bach all over again with the softer, more authentic sound. I reported how our daughter, Rosemary, had stopped me at the door the night before, as I departed for a meeting at the college, saying, Papa, are you a visitor?
No, I’m not a visitor.
Her face brightened: Then are you staying here tonight?
No, I have to go to a meeting.
We spoke of meetings, deadlines, of documents.
I work for the future,
Bret said. Years ago, running water was a luxury. Now everyone considers it a right. But now wise planning is considered a luxury—people don’t think they should have to pay for it, deal with it, obey it. I work for a generation beyond us—and they can’t help me.
He seemed to view his life as a holding action, being brave under siege. Then he looked at his watch, said he would have to bike hard and fast to make it to a meeting. He declined my offer of a ride. We agreed on Lacey’s Tavern in Lake Oswego for the next month, and he was off.
Lake Oswego was the town where we grew up, from 1957 onward. We rode our bikes everywhere, collecting enough bottles to cash in for a root beer float whenever we felt like it. We fished the lake and the river, built forts in the woods, terrorized the library, shot bows and arrows into the bank of the school yard, ran a paper route. We generally owned the town as only children in a small place could.
But Lacey’s Tavern, at First and B, was a place we had never been.
Bret got there early, and I had to grope my way to the back booth to find him. I was amazed that our hometown had this man den where people seemed to be hiding from daylight—TV over the bar belting out some big game, the eyes of the regulars glinting from their booths. When I turned to my brother, even in the dark, he seemed different, smaller somehow, backed into a corner. We ordered beer to start, and I held up my bottle for a toast, but he didn’t move. He didn’t sip. I tried to start in on some scrap of news from my life, but he sat still. When I finally recognized this and paused in my rush, he said, I want my ashes scattered on Mount Adams. . . .
A knife of ice cut my heart. I grabbed my brother’s hand, tears in my eyes.
What are you saying?
. . . that way, with the water cycle . . .
His voice trailed off. His hand in my hand was cold. I gripped him. He did not grip back.
I could not get more from him. He seemed far away, living a story he did not tell. What had happened? There seemed to be some kind of plan, but he wasn’t giving it to me. By prying, I got a few details from him about surface things. Had something big happened in his work? At home? Some fright, or severe defeat? He seemed to be staring something in the face that stunned him. It seemed like an invasion, even an accusation, to demand that my brother tell me. I did not know how to find the deeper place.
Later that month, I went to visit Bret in Salem, with my wife and daughter. Rosie played with Katie and Matt down the hall, and Bret and Lynne offered Beverly and me dessert, and news of their Quaker meeting, a hike they were planning. I studied my brother’s face, turned slightly up as was his habit, trying to see if his troubles were visible. He did not return my look, but followed the conversation Lynne was leading about their activities. We passed the evening, and then drove home to Portland.
My ignorance of my brother’s life, and of my own, was boundless. In four months my marriage of eighteen years would be over, but I didn’t know that. I was a good person, wasn’t I? Divorce was impossible. I would last. Maybe my brother was keeping some equivalent half-known endgame from his little brother. He would not say. And I did not share my qualms with him. We seemed to keep a code, protecting each other from knowing what we ourselves barely knew but could feel, like a chill coming from the cave of the future.
What had happened between our second and third meeting? Was Bret about to lose his job? Had something catastrophic happened in his marriage? Did he have a secret about his health, a sudden sense of mortality? Maybe he would tell me when we met again.
I drove down to Boon’s Tavern in Salem, and Bret walked from the Marion County office building. He ordered water, and a salad. I had a burger and a beer. This was Salem’s historic tavern, where legislators met and deals were struck. It felt like a club of some kind, all dark wood and banter. In our back booth, I began about recent doings. There is so much to say when you think a busy life is what you are supposed to be doing. But eventually, I realized Bret wasn’t returning my stories of busy valor with equivalent stories of his own. Finally, he spoke.
Let me show you something.
He opened his wallet, and took out a Chinese cookie fortune. It had been unfolded many times, was gray with wear: Learn to cut your expectations in half.
I felt the knife of ice again.
No!
I said. Double your expectations! You have to go for more.
I can’t,
he said. This is how it is. You know how Daddy says about writing, ‘Lower your standards and keep going’? That’s how I have to do my life.
Well, what?
I said. What’s so bad?
Well,
he said, sometimes at home, at dinner, the only sound is the clink of the silverware.
I know about that,
I said. We have silences at my house, too. We are raising a child in a world where adults don’t laugh, don’t touch, don’t look at each other.
He was still, looking into my eyes. We have to do something,
I said. We have to.
I can’t,
he said again. We’re moving to Canada.
What?
At the end of the summer. I’ve quit my job. We’re selling the house. Lynne has a job teaching in Smithers, B.C. It’s about four hundred miles north of the border.
You’re going—that soon?
She has wanted to get back to Canada. Her job makes $30,000 . . . plus.
Bret,
I said, are you sure this is a good idea? You don’t have to do this.
You said so yourself.
He glanced into my eyes then looked away. It says in your book, ‘Part of our love must be to teach each other how to live alone.’ I need to learn to live away from the family—be on my own.
That’s just a book,
I said. It’s not about you. You don’t have to go that far.
But I do,
he said. And he stood to return to work.
Our last monthly rendezvous was in the town of Rhododendron on the west slope of Mount Hood. We met in the parking lot at the store, left my car there, and headed east in his, turned off the highway at a road he knew, and followed a gravel track to White River and a glacial outwash plain on the dry east slope. The stream ran milky with glacial polish, and we parked near a grove of wind-shaped trees. It threatened rain, but we got the tent up before the storm hit.
Over a dinner of granola bars and apples, and gritty water from the river, we recalled our camping days—Mount Jefferson, hiking the Skyline Trail, Cove Palisades, Steens Mountain, French Pete.
Then the rain began, and we hunkered down in our sleeping bags in the dark. There was more to say, but we were silent awhile.
Remember what we used to say?
my brother asked.
Good night,
I said. God bless you, have sweet dreams, see you tomorrow.
Rain and wind made a symphony over the tent, in the trees, and the river hushed along in the dark.
WOULD IT MAKE YOU SAD?
The first time I met my future father-in-law, when I was nineteen, I wore a red bandana around my neck, a white shirt and white Levis, and no shoes. I came running from the Art Department at the University of Oregon toward my redheaded girl where she balanced and bobbed like a flower beside her father.
Hello, Dr. Beech,
I said, careening to a stop.
Why, hello,
he said, looking me over.
The next day, she told me his assessment: Kim will never last.
Is that so?
I thought to myself. We’ll see about that.
Dr. Beech went back to California, and I took my girl to a dance at the Village